BASILICI. — A great Byzantine legal compilation, promulgated in Greek under the emperor Leone VI the Wise (886–911), under the title Collection of the Entire Legislation in 60 Books (Παράλληλος συναγωγὴ καὶ σύνταξις ἐν ὅλοις βιβλίοις ἐξήκοντα πάσης νομοθεσίας).
This work was conceived and brought to completion as a repurgatio, that is, a correction, updating, and recasting, of the entire legislative work of Justinian (v.) and of the legislation that followed it up to the emperor Leone VI (in particular, account was also taken of the Ecloga of Leone Isaurico and Costantino Copronimo, although not explicitly). This repurgatio of the ancient sources was already planned and partly carried out in the time of Basilio I (867–86), as is indicated by references in two passages, one in the preface to the Prochiro, the other in the proem of the Epanagoge. As we can ascertain from the text of the B. that has come down to us, the material supplied by earlier legislation, after everything that was or seemed unsuitable to the times and needs of the age of Basilio I and Leone VI had been removed, was recast and arranged in 60 books, themselves divided into titles (within each title, matters relating to the same legal institution are collected: de nuptiis, de legatis, de tutoribus, etc.), provided with rubrics and subdivided into capitula and themata. In the capitula, the passages taken from the sources follow one another in the order in which they appeared there. As for the constitution of the Greek text of the B., the compilers used for this purpose the translations, paraphrases, elaborations, and scholastic works produced by the teachers of law of the sixth–seventh centuries; this applies to the Justinianic Latin sources, whereas for the Novels and the later legislation the original Greek text was generally used, or in some cases was somewhat reworked.
In several codices, the text of the B. is supplied with an apparatus of scholia, most of which are fragments of commentaries and paraphrases on the text of the Corpus Iuris dating from the sixth to the beginning of the seventh centuries; passages drawn from works by legal writers of the tenth–twelfth centuries were occasionally added to them. In character and arrangement, this system of scholia finds a complete analogy in the so-called Chains of Byzantine theological literature. As regards the replacement of such Chains by the B., the opinion now accepted is that this apparatus was added to the text subsequently, in all probability in the tenth century, and that later, in the twelfth–thirteenth centuries, excerpts from the commentaries of jurists of the tenth–twelfth centuries were added. Ecclesiastical matters are treated principally in bk. I, tit. I (the Trinity and the Catholic faith); bk. III, tit. 1–4; bk. IV; bk. V, tit. 1–3 (matters concerning the organization and administration of the Church and ecclesiastical private law); bk. LX, tit. 54, 20 ff. (penalties for violations of the laws of the Church and against heretics). All these provisions are inspired by the principles of a rigorous defense of the dogma and discipline of the Church.
The B. as they exist today, owing to extensive gaps in the present state of the manuscript tradition, are incomplete, even in the most recent edition by G. E. Heimbach (6 vols., Leipzig 1833–70), with the supplements of Zachariae von Lingenthal (ibid. 1846) and of C. Ferrini and G. Mercati (ibid. 1897).
For this reason, the two summaries of the entire work mentioned here are significant for obtaining an idea of the parts of the B. that have been lost or are still lying hidden in manuscripts: the Synopsis Basilicarum maior of the tenth century (ed. Zachariae von Lingenthal, Ius Graeco-Romanum, vol. VI), and even more so the Tipocito from the end of the eleventh century, of which thus far books I–XII, XIII–XVIII, and XXIV–XXXVIII have been published in vols. 25, 31, and 107 of the Studi e Testi of the Vatican Library, respectively edited by C. Ferrini and G. Mercati, by F. Dölger, and by S. Hoermann and E. Seidl.